The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter Four
A refutation of Michael Tracy’s deceitful campaign to impugn the veracity of “Into Thin Air” and spread misinformation about the 1996 Everest disaster
In this chapter I will address Michael Tracy’s allegation that when I wrote Into Thin Air, I chose not to include certain events in order to intentionally misrepresent what caused the 1996 Everest disaster.
Fifty-one seconds into a video Tracy posted on April 7, 2024, titled “Sandy Pittman and the Yellow Brick Road,” he says:
Previously I was critical of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air because it failed to mention that the Mountain Madness clients received four oxygen bottles while the Adventure Consultants’ received only three for their summit bids. Krakauer also ignored the stunt that Scott Fischer and his lead Sherpa Lopsang were planning on the summit.
Another major event left out by Krakauer was the theft of gear that had happened earlier in the Expedition. Although this had not played a major role in the events of May 10th or 11th it was a rather significant event and it is not clear why Krakauer chose to leave it out other than that it didn’t contribute to his narrative that inexperienced climbers were the cause of all evils on Mount Everest.
But from this it should be apparent that significant events from the 1996 expedition were left out of Krakauer’s book, nor do they appear in Boukreev’s book, The Climb. Each of those authors had a narrative they were pushing, and they just ignore things that don’t fit their version. But any author needs to leave out some details. Krakauer could not include every detail about where the oxygen bottles were cached, how many were there, etc., and while I think facts such as those are important, clearly Krakauer was more focused on the important details of coffee pots in Base Camp.
As I will explain shortly, “coffee pots in Base Camp” is a snide reference to Tracy’s false claim that I blamed Sandy Pittman for the 1996 disaster. In Tracy’s videos, he frequently claims that I invented one or another dishonest narrative to “hide the truth” when I wrote Into Thin Air. At the 1:26 mark in this video, Tracy alleges I was pushing the false narrative that “inexperienced climbers were the cause of all evils on Mount Everest.” At other times he claims I blamed the 1996 disaster on the lack of fixed ropes, or Lobsang Jangbu, or Scott Fischer, or Anatoli Boukreev, or Sandy Hill Pittman.
When Tracy asserts that I blamed the disaster on various isolated factors in this reductionist fashion, he is egregiously misrepresenting what I actually wrote. My book attributed the disaster to a cascade of numerous interconnected decisions and actions — a much more nuanced explanation. As I reported in Into Thin Air, only a few of the mistakes that were made on May 10 seemed especially serious when considered by themselves, but throughout the day the accrual of multiple errors led “steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.”
Among the most outlandish claims made by Tracy is that I invented a “narrative that Sandy Pittman was the root of all evils on the mountain” — an allegation he makes at the 3:20 mark in this video.
Tracy claims multiple times in various videos that I hold Pittman responsible for the Everest disaster, but he has never provided a quote from my book or anywhere else that actually states this, because I’ve never written or said that Pittman was responsible for the tragedy. I do not believe, nor have I ever believed, she was to blame, and I am genuinely sorry about all the undeserved criticism and hate she had to endure in the aftermath of the disaster.
Tracy’s claim about “coffee pots in Base Camp” several paragraphs above refers to the tsunami of criticism Pittman received from online haters for bringing a small espresso maker to Everest, and Tracy accuses me of inciting the haters. The truth, however, is that I mentioned Pittman’s espresso maker only once in my book, and when I mentioned it, I was simply quoting her own words in one of the first dispatches she filed as a correspondent for NBC Interactive Media, which had assigned her to post reports on the World Wide Web about her expedition to climb Everest. The day before Pittman departed New York for Nepal, she posted this:
All my personal stuff is packed.… It looks like I’ll have as much computer and electronic equipment as I will have climbing gear.… Two IBM laptops, a video camera, three 35mm cameras, one Kodak digital camera, two tape recorders, a CD-ROM player, a printer, and enough (I hope) solar panels and batteries to power the whole project.… I wouldn’t dream of leaving town without an ample supply of Dean & DeLuca’s Near East blend and my espresso maker. Since we’ll be on Everest on Easter, I brought four wrapped chocolate eggs. An Easter egg hunt at 18,000 feet? We’ll see.
As I noted previously, in the first minute of this video Tracy criticizes me for ignoring “the stunt that Scott Fischer and his lead Sherpa Lopsang Jangbu were planning on the summit.” Tracy repeats the same allegation about the “stunt” in other videos, as well. In this video Tracy explains that he is delving
into the Sandy Pittman issue because she has been singled out for criticism in the recent YouTube videos. I’m also using Sandy Pittman’s story because it discusses what the big secret of the ’96 disaster was.
The “big secret” to which Tracy refers is mentioned on page 162 of Climbing High, the book written about the 1996 disaster by the Danish climber Lene Gammelgaard, one of Scott Fischer’s clients. Here is the relevant passage, which describes her encountering Lopsang Jangbu in the pre-dawn hours of our ascent above the South Col:
Lopsang is easily recognizable in his white Sherpa suit, which he wears over his down clothes, and he has a flagpole sticking up out of his backpack. Between coughing fits, he manages to tell us he and Scott have arranged for a stunt on the summit of Everest, but he’ll not reveal any of the details.
At the 1:34 mark in this video, Tracy raises questions about why most of Fischer’s team spent so much time on the summit before beginning their descent. Anatoli Boukreev reached the summit just before 1:00 P.M. Neal Beidleman and Martin Adams got there at 1:25, followed by Klev Schoening at 2:00. By 2:30, Tim Madsen, Charlotte Fox, Pittman, Gammelgaard, and Lopsang had arrived on top, as well, leaving Fischer himself as the only member of the team who still hadn’t arrived.
Adams left the summit and headed down alone by 1:40. Boukreev started his descent around 2:00, and Schoening started down soon thereafter. At approximately 3:10, by which time Fischer still hadn’t appeared, Beidleman began descending with Pittman, Madsen, Fox, and Gammelgaard, while Lopsang remained on the summit to wait for Fischer. It wasn’t until 3:40 that Fischer finally arrived on the summit.
At the I:34 mark in this video Tracy disingenuously asserts,
So if you have read Into Thin Air and are wondering, “Why didn’t they just head down? Why did they wait so long?” — now you know there was this boyish stunt planned for the summit with the Mountain Madness team. Exactly what the stunt was remains a mystery, as Scott Fischer died on the mountain and Lobsang was killed in an avalanche later that same year.
Obviously, if Jon Krakauer had written those exact same words in his Outside magazine article or in his bestselling book, that is all we would have heard about for the last 28 years: “Boyish Prank Kills Eight on Everest.”
The entire story would have been about the prank, and the entire blame put on Scott Fischer. This does not mean that any of that analysis would have been accurate, just that simple stories where people are punished for their obvious hubris sell very well.
At the 4:25 mark Tracy speculates further about the stunt:
Fischer and Lobsang planning to pull some stunt on the summit explains a lot of the problems with the timelines. Things that were previously explained as being stupid for no reason now have those same people being stupid for a reason. It could also explain why some of the versions didn’t match up and why Scott Fischer was so slow. It’s not clear exactly what the stunt entailed. But if it required some equipment or banners or something to be carried to the summit, it could explain Fischer’s extremely slow climb time.
At the 5:00 mark Tracy adds,
It is also difficult to believe that Krakauer didn’t know that Fischer was planning some stunt. He wouldn’t know exactly what it was, but he most likely would have known that some sort of stunt was planned. First, anyone who spends any amount of time looking into this will immediately spot there are problems with the timing and the, “Oh, they were just stupid” explanation doesn’t really work. This leaves it as either Krakauer missed the fact that Fischer and Lopsang were planning a major stunt on the summit, making his book the worst piece of investigative journalism in mountaineering history. Or he knew about it and chose to ignore it, making it neither investigative nor journalism.
Everything Tracy says in the excerpts above is false. After interviewing members of Fischer’s team in the aftermath of the Everest calamity, I learned that Lopsang had indeed planned some kind of stunt for the summit on May 10, 1996. I also learned that he’d planned a similar stunt during his 1995 ascent of Everest, when he was working for Rob Hall instead of Fischer. My research led me to conclude that neither stunt amounted to much, however, which explains why I didn’t mention either of them in Into Thin Air.
In 1995, Lopsang’s stunt consisted of carrying a sombrero to the top of the mountain, where he intended to wear it for a summit photo. But his plan went awry when Hall told all his guides and clients to turn around and descend just as Lopsang, out in front of everyone else, was arriving at the base of the Hillary Step. Lopsang disobeyed Hall and continued climbing to the summit alone, but because all the others did what Hall told them to do, there was nobody to take a photo of Lopsang when he got to the top.
Regarding the 1996 stunt, I don’t know what Lopsang intended it to be, but ultimately the stunt consisted of nothing more than Lopsang tossing some small prayer flags, planting his large flag and flagpole on the summit, and then posing in front of the flag in his white “Sherpa suit” for the photo displayed above (note the large yellow flag in the background behind the orange oxygen cannister). This photo was shot by one of the Sherpas on Makalu Gau’s team.
Based on interviews I did with Lopsang, Charlotte Fox, Neal Beidleman, Tim Madsen, Guy Cotter, and Ed Viesturs, I determined the stunt had no bearing on why Beidleman and four of Fischer’s clients didn’t start down until approximately 3:10, nor did it explain why Fischer didn’t arrive on the summit until 3:40. The excerpt below from Chapter 25 of Into Thin Air offers a more plausible explanation for their delayed descent:
Neal Beidleman reached the summit at 1:25 P.M. with client Martin Adams. When they got there, Andy Harris and Anatoli Boukreev were already on top; I had departed eight minutes earlier. Assuming that the rest of his team would be appearing shortly, Beidleman snapped some photos, bantered with Boukreev, and sat down to wait. At 1:45, client Klev Schoening ascended the final rise, pulled out a photo of his wife and children, and commenced a tearful celebration of his arrival on top of the world.
From the summit, a bump in the ridge blocks one’s view of the rest of the route, and by 2:00 — the designated turn-around time — there was still no sign of Fischer or any other clients. Beidleman began to grow concerned about the lateness of the hour….
Beidleman said that according to Fischer’s loosely formulated plan for the summit day, Lopsang Jangbu was supposed to be at the front of the line, carrying a radio and two coils of rope to install ahead of the clients; Boukreev and Beidleman — neither of whom was given a radio — were to be “in the middle or near the front, depending on how the clients were moving; and Scott, carrying a second radio, was going to be ‘sweep.’ At Rob’s suggestion, we’d decided to enforce a two o’clock turn-around time: anybody who wasn’t within spitting distance of the summit by two P.M. had to turn around and go down.”
“It was supposed to be Scott’s job to turn clients around,” Beidleman explained. “We’d talked about it. I’d told him that as the third guide, I didn’t feel comfortable telling clients who’d paid sixty-five thousand dollars that they had to go down. So Scott agreed that would be his responsibility. But for whatever reason, it didn’t happen.” In fact, the only people to reach the summit before 2:00 P.M. on May 10 were Boukreev, Harris, Beidleman, Adams, Schoening, and me; if Fischer and Hall had been true to their pre-arranged rules, everyone else would have been turned around before the top.
Despite Beidleman’s growing anxiety about the advancing clock, he didn’t have a radio, so there was no way to discuss the situation with Fischer. Lopsang, who did have a radio, was still somewhere out of sight below….
The upshot, Beidleman recalled, is that “I ended up sitting on the summit for a very long time, looking at my watch and waiting for Scott to show, thinking about heading down — but every time I stood up to leave, another one of our clients would roll over the crest of the ridge, and I’d sit back down to wait for them.”
Tracy’s insistence that the stunt was to blame is nonsense. When I interviewed Beidleman after the disaster, he confirmed that the stunt had nothing to do with why he and his clients remained on the summit for so long. The real reason for the delay was much more obvious: Beidleman wasn’t given a radio on May 10, making it impossible for him to communicate with Fischer. Although it makes no sense, Fischer apparently didn’t think his guides needed to carry radios.
On numerous occasions in his videos, Michael Tracy claims that I cherry-picked quotes and facts from multiple sources to invent a narrative in Into Thin Air that distorts the truth about what happened on Everest in 1996. For example, in a post to his confidential Discord server on April 16, 2024, Tracy wrote:
You have to look at the problem Krakauer is trying to solve — tell a compelling story that he can say every quote is fact check[ed] and every quote he has on a recording…. This is simple. Just ask the same person about the event 10 times. The person will say 10 different things. And if they don’t, just ask 10 different people. Then pick the version that works for your compelling drama and you have a 100% fact checked story….
Then leave out the stuff like the theft of equipment, the suicidal tendencies of one of the climbers [i.e., Beck Weathers], the weather reports, the accounts of 4 oxygen bottles, the accounts of the [fixed ropes], and the accounts of people who disagree with you….
If you look at it, that is exactly what Krakauer did. For instance, Lopsang told him two different stories about his last encounter with Fischer. He picked the one that worked best for his story and pretended that he never heard about the other version. Lopsang pointed this out. And Krakauer just said, “I have my written notes about the first version, so that is what I am going with.”
Tracy’s Discord post is bullshit.
I did not “pretend” that I’d never heard about the letter Lopsang wrote to Outside on August 11, 1996, nor did I select the account from Lopsang that “worked best.” I carefully considered what Lopsang wrote in his letter, and then determined that his account of his descent from the summit with Scott Fischer was clearly not accurate, based on detailed, much more credible statements Lopsang had made to me in a four-hour, tape-recorded interview a month previously, and statements Tim Madsen made to me in a tape-recorded interview on July 18, 1996.
Here is how Lopsang described his descent with Fisher in his letter to Outside:
From the South Summit I physically dragged [Scott] down through the storm until he could go no further. There I waited with Scott, determined to save him or die. Finally, he threatened me to save myself, saying he would jump off if I did not go down….
Krakauer makes references to my vomiting, implying that I was weak and unable to do my job; that it affected my performance…. I have been over 8,000 meters many times, and each time I vomit. It is just something that happens to me and has nothing to do with altitude sickness. I have done it on all expeditions. It just happens….
Also, if I was sick and weak, then why would I wait so long on the summit for Scott, Rob Hall and Doug Hansen? If I was sick and weak, how could I spend seven hours dragging Scott back down from the South Summit?
Lopsang’s assertions that he “physically dragged [Scott] down through the storm until he could go no further,” and spent “seven hours dragging Scott back down from the South Summit” are irreconcilably contradicted by his statements in my lengthy July interview with him, and by statements made by Tim Madsen that corroborated the statements Lopsang made in July.
According to Madsen, Fischer slid down from the South Summit to the gentle slopes above the Balcony on his rear end, alone. Madsen told me was sitting on the Balcony when he looked up to see that Fischer had
…just glissaded the whole snow slope [below the South Summit] on his butt, bypassing the rock steps. He had glissaded the fall line; it took him about 100 yards away from the ridge. He was traversing back up from where he stopped glissading to where the trail was…. He looked really tired. He’d take ten steps, then sit and rest, take a couple more steps, rest again. He was moving real slow. But I could see Lopsang above him, coming down the ridge, and I figured, shoot, with Lopsang there to look after him, Scott would be O.K.
And here is what Lopsang told me about his descent with Fischer when I interviewed him in July in person, in Seattle, on July 25, 1996:
At 6:00 P.M., I find Scott below fixed ropes…. Just above Balcony. He is not walking. Sliding on bottom…. He is sliding down face, I am walking down ridge. I throw rope for him to get up to crevasse above balcony…. He is trying to walk, but too tired. If he can just get to Balcony, he can slide again. He is walking little bit, not so much.
Scott is not using oxygen, so I put mask on him. He says, “I am very sick, too sick to go down. I am going to jump.” He is saying many times, acting like crazy man, so I tie him on rope, quickly, otherwise he is jumping down into Tibet.…
We get to Balcony. I tie him to 25 meters of rope, let him slide down 25 meters ahead, we stay roped together from there. Bad storm. We lost route. No find route. Just waiting. Bad weather. Got very bad….
A little later, according to Lopsang, Fischer and Lopsang were resting when they were overtaken by Makalu Gau and his two Sherpas, Mingma Tshering and Nima Gombu. After a brief discussion, Gau, Mingma, and Nima continued down. Fischer and Lopsang soon resumed their descent as well, following the faint tracks left by the Taiwanese team as best they could. About 8:00 P.M. they encountered Gau, alone now, about three hundred feet below the Balcony. Too weak to go on, Gau had been left on a snow-covered ledge by his Sherpas.
The gentle snow gully Fischer and Lopsang had been gingerly descending ended here amid outcroppings of loose, steep shale, and Fischer, like Gau, was unable to handle the challenging terrain in his ailing condition. Lopsang told me,
Scott cannot walk now. I have big problem. He is big body, I am very small; I cannot carry. He tells me, Lopsang, you go down. You go down….
I tell to Scott, “No, I stay together here with you.” I stay with Scott and Makalu one hour, maybe longer. I am very cold, very tired. Scott tell to me, ‘You go down, send up Anatoli.’ So I say, ‘O.K., I go down, I send quick Sherpa up and Anatoli.’ Then I make good place for Scott and go down.”
The detailed accounts provided by Tim Madsen and Lopsang in his July interview with me are much more credible than the brief, contradictory account provided by Lopsang in his August letter to Outside. That is why I based what I wrote in Into Thin Air on the two interviews cited above rather than Lopsang’s letter.
At the beginning of this chapter I included an excerpt from the video Michael Tracy posted on April 7, 2024, in which he says,
Previously I was critical of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air because it failed to mention that the Mountain Madness clients received four oxygen bottles while the Adventure Consultants’ received only three for their summit bids.
This criticism is valid. In future editions of my book I will update what I wrote about the number of oxygen cannisters received by each team — although when I do, I will correct Tracy’s incorrect assertion that Scott Fischer’s clients each received four oxygen bottles, and that Rob Hall’s clients each received three bottles. At least one of Fischer’s clients, and possibly others, received more than four oxygen cannisters. And it’s possible at least one or two of Hall’s clients received more than three cannisters.
In other videos, Tracy has also criticized me for not writing about “oxygen bottle theft” from the South Summit. He falsely attributes this to a dishonest narrative he claims I invented to promote Rob Hall’s business. As Tracy asserts in a video he posted on January 7, 2025:
A narrative that says it doesn’t matter if you pay a top guiding service $65,000 to guide you up Everest because someone is just going to steal your oxygen and you will die anyway is not going to sell a lot of tickets.
It’s likely that some oxygen bottles cached on the South Summit by Sherpas on Rob Hall’s team were used instead by climbers from Scott Fischer’s team and/or Makalu Gau’s team. Indeed, in his January 7 video, Tracy points out that during a presentation I gave at Colorado College in 2016, at one point I glibly stated that during my descent in 1996, “I ran out of oxygen. Someone stole the third of my three oxygen bottles.”
I regret saying this. I have no evidence that anyone stole an oxygen cannister intended for me. Yes, the purportedly full cannister Michael Groom handed to me at the South Summit on May 10 was only half full. But I lack sufficient information to state with certainty that the cannister was depleted because someone from another team intentionally exchanged their half-empty cannister for one of Hall’s full cannisters earlier in the day.
Nobody, including Michael Tracy, knows exactly how many oxygen bottles were stashed at the South Summit by Sherpas employed by the three different climbing teams on May 10. Furthermore, nobody, including Michael Tracy, knows exactly how many oxygen bottles were used by each guide, client, and Sherpa on those three teams.
I’m certain that I used two bottles, plus approximately ten minutes of oxygen from the bottle Michael Groom gave me when I collapsed above the South Summit, plus the half-full bottle Groom gave me when we arrived at the South Summit. But I can’t be sure how many bottles my teammates used, let alone how many were used by members of other teams.
I’m certain that Groom and Yasuko Namba each received their third bottles from Hall’s stash before they climbed from the South Summit to the summit. Additionally, after Groom, Namba, Andy Harris, and I returned to the South Summit on our descent, according to Groom’s book, each of us received a bottle from the eight purportedly full bottles in Hall’s stash. Which suggests that Groom and Namba each received four bottles. It seems highly likely, however, that most of the eight bottles in Hall’s stash — and possibly all of them — were not actually full, although it’s impossible to know why with any certainty.
My third bottle, which was only half full when Groom handed it to me, ran out after approximately 3 hours as I was descending. It seems likely the bottle Groom gave to Namba wasn’t full either, because hers ran out after a similar amount of time, although I don’t know the flow rate she was using. It’s possible Groom turned her regulator up to full flow, 4 liters per minute, at the South Summit, and that’s why she ran out of gas, but that’s just speculation.
The point I’m trying to make is that when I wrote Into Thin Air, I didn’t have enough credible evidence to state with certainty that oxygen bottles were stolen from Rob Hall’s stash on May 10, 1996. Nor do I have enough credible evidence to make such an assertion today.
